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I work for a healthcare non-profit organization (NPO) in Kansas City, KS as the project manager. As a NPO we have little funds if any for advertising, much less online advertising. So when I learned about SEO and what it could mean for us I dove in head first. First thing I did was add the meta tags (the guy before me left everything black) and began to add us to different directories online as well as searching for other sites that had us linked so I could update our information. With just over a year of doing this I’m looking into the next phase of our SEO, link building.

At first I was a little intimidated about this process. Everywhere I looked online not only revealed the difficulty of this task but the time consumption as well. I don’t have a lot of time to devote to this area so I started to think how I could minimize my time in this but still get some good results. Then I over heard a few people involved with a volunteer group at our facility talk about their recent blog posts. A light bulb went off. We have close to 2,000 volunteers a year. Now not all of them may have blogs, but I’d be willing to bet that most of them do. I approached the two volunteers to ask them if they wouldn’t mind writing a post about their experience with volunteering with us and adding a link to our site. Neither of them had a problem with it. Next I started looking at our supporters, many of which are churches. I then contacted them one at a time and all of them had no problem adding a link from their site to ours and without a required reciprocal link! The next three steps I’m planning are to:

Ask our employees to link our site via any blogs they have, Facebook (I know its not crawled for links but visitors we get from there still count), and so on and so forth…

Get our clinic providers to write blog posts weekly. I’ve started a Wordpress blog for them, but I will have to keep reminding them to keep it going constantly. The last thing we would want is an outdated blog.

Finally I’m going to approach our board members about adding a link from their company websites to ours. I see this as vital because having a link from prestigious companies directing people to us would certainly help out our rankings and get some ‘weighted’ links!

Everything has just been set in motion so I really haven’t had much time to track results, but I’m looking forward to it! What I’ve learned from this experience is that SEO is, as I thought, hard work. It takes time to get results, every link helps, and you never know the answer unless you ask.

Thanks for reading!

About seiko_08 —
I have a family. I work on the Internet. I write. The potato knows what happened last winter. SEO Analyst for Vizion Interactive. I also heart Criminal Minds.

Ahh I've neglected LinkedIn. I'll be sure to get them into LinkedIn after I get their Facebook and Blog up and going. Currently since I'm no longer with them I'm in the process of training staff on how to post and update. They understand the importance of keeping posts current. But there is an importance of direct NFP to NFP connecting that needs to happen. Thanks!

That sounds like great stuff. Actually getting people to write those posts is going to be the tough part though! People are often keen to do that kind of thing, but with the best will in the world... well, you know how it goes.

Depending on how systematic you want to be (and how much you can push people!) I'd create a spreadsheet or database containing all the people you want to target, with the following in,

do they have a blog/social media profile where they can post?

if so, have you asked them to post something?

have they actually done it?

if not,have you nagged them?

if they have done, is the link correct?

Or something like that, anyway... Link building is difficult, but one of the hardest parts is being organised about it!

Ironically I'm not with this organization any more, however I'm still running their website and SEO. And you are 100% right, it is tough to get volunteers to write posts. But one thing I've found is that for this specific organization, one way they serve the public is by providing low cost prenatal care and child birth services, the mothers who are really into this natural child birth blog like crazy. I'm amazed at their networking with each other. So after a few 'nagging' emails they've gotten a few posts here and there. I like your suggestions though! Thanks.

You make an excellent point about utilizing existing relationships for improving link density.

I would just add that the link strategy changes dramatically if you are a large brand vs. a small brand. As a larger brand, you have options for building high value links through strategic partnerships with other large brands. These efforts are exponentially more valuable than acquiring many low-value links (or using link-farming efforts). Unfortunately, in my experience I see very few large brands taking advantage of this strategy.

You are clever enough to do that Seiko_08. Link building is a very important concept regarding SEO but the difficult part of them is, it is time consuming. With a NPO, thinking about link building strategies is even more difficult. I am happy that you got an amazing opportunity like this. I would also recommend LinkedIn to you for getting even more better reults. Your next three planning steps are also worth doing.

Link-building is very hard at the best of times, and as a NPO it must be even more difficult! The webmasters of many of these sites wouldn't think like you have, and they're missing out on a great opportunity.

It's just a pity people like myself can't apply the same methods to it at the moment and in a way, you're lucky that you can! You've had an opportunity and you've grasbed it.

I am doing volunteer web development & media work for an arts organisation. I am trying to get the curator to embrace twitter, etc and work on writing authoritative blog posts that will draw attention to his organisation and all of the different things that they/we are working on.

This would greatly benefit generating buzz for the tech-savvy- however, we still won't connect with a large swath of the heritage community, who skew older and may not have the social media know-how to join the conversation.

To come back around, my strategy is going to be to find relevant articles, Digg them and broadcast them to twitter followers. I am going to gain followers by studying the local and national heritage communities and hope the articles draw interest. By accompanying with an authoritative blog, I am hoping we can build an online presence.

When you talk to your curator throw some numbers at him/her. One thing I've found with presenting to our board and our executive director is that while they may not grasp the concept, they will grasp numbers and higher numbers means more visibility which in turn means more money.

It's interesting to note that, like your situation with the non-profit, many webmasters starting out with SEO also don't have much, if any, funds for website promotion and SEO. That's when we need to get creative. I think you were quite creative in your situation, using the resources that you had available to you. If only we all had a few thousand volunteers for each of our new websites. ;)